Max Frazee

Max Frazee was born in La Jolla, California in 1955. He studied Fine Arts at the California State University in San Diego and at the Irvine Institute of the University of California. As a Whitney Museum scholar he went to New York in 1982. He still lives and works in New York. Frazee works with installations of different sizes which use a series of various media, such as pastel drawings, videos, photos, photocopies, sketches, texts and quotes.Stimulated by the sudden emergence of mass murderers in all industrialized nations in the 70's, Frazee has been extensively researching this new criminal trend. He reads all available literature on this subject (his library contains more than 200 books dealing with serial murders), collects news reports, receives police material from journalist friends and has slowly developed a feeling for the character of the mass murderer and for the visual metaphors, which he uses to tell their story. Frazee has brought together material from 600 mass murderers from a time frame from 1900 to 1993. He has portrayed ten of them in his artistic works, among them the 'Hillside Strangler', Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. The Green River Killer, who killed at least 49 women, has not been apprehended, even though the murders took place more than ten years ago (1982 - 1984). The police inquiries are still running, so Frazee's work on this subject is still open to changes. His comprehensive multimedia installation reflects the victims' situation, the police examinations, the killer's profile and the way he proceeded. Drawings on the walls of the Ice Factory are combined with tent-like creations, spades, police evidence, autopsies and hypotheses about the killer's personality for this display. For Frazee, the continued game of cat and mouse between the victim, killer, police and society goes back to the hunter-game constellation. The victim is the game, and the killer becomes the police's game. The police become the hunter of the killer and society's game (especially the media), because they can not catch the murderer. Society is at the same time hunts the police and is the game of the killer, because it produces the victims. see exhibition: "Art That Barks - Art That Bites" "The Green River Killer Project"